Rep. Ribble: Hillary Sowing Suspicion With Silence on Emails

A report that Hillary Clinton ignored congressional investigators who asked her directly about using her personal email could hurt the former secretary of state with the swing voters who will decide the 2016 presidential election, Rep. Reid Ribble told Newsmax TV on Wednesday.

"It's going to really be dependent on what else happens and how Secretary Clinton chooses to deal with this issue," the Wisconsin Republican told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner. "The more she hides from it, the more suspicious people are going to get."

Clinton, who launched her second Democratic presidential run on Sunday, was still in office in late 2012 when Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote her to ask about Obama administration email practices, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.

"Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?" Issa wrote to Clinton. He never received a reply, the Times reported.

In March, the Times revealed that Clinton, in fact, used personal email exclusively while in office and routed it through a private server kept at her house in New York.

The story revived a familiar Clinton meme: that the former first lady, U.S. senator and top diplomat ignores the law when it impedes her desire for secrecy and control. Clinton scrambled to explain the email arrangement but rejected calls for an independent audit of the server.

She could find the controversy weighing on her in a general election, said Ribble.

"I believe that deep middle vote, that independent voter in this country that really decides presidential elections, when it's all said and done, they're not going to like the fact that she's hiding something from them and not being transparent," he said.

"We've just gone through what will have been eight years of the least transparent government that I can remember," he said, "and having someone running for president who's hiding emails — and emails that are owned by the taxpayer — is problematic."

A report that Hillary Clinton ignored congressional investigators who asked her directly about using her personal email could hurt the former secretary of state with the swing voters who will decide the 2016 presidential election, Rep. Reid Ribble told Newsmax TV on Wednesday.